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The Memory of Old Jack was a hard and sweet and deep cut of a book that I finished shortly after I found out that my grandfather had passed away at the age of 99 last month. It seemed fitting that my grandpa waited for Wendell Berry to pass away first earlier in August of this year. I don’t know if my Grandpa ever read Wendell Berry–I only discovered the author last year (the horror, the horror I know) and my Grandpa’s memory was pretty sparse in his last years so I never got the chance to ask him. But there’s not a Wendell Berry novel that I read where I don’t think about my Grandpa. And now with him gone, I don’t think there ever will be.
Berry’s novels aren’t meant for the young. He writes about the ancient and eternal in a way that would not have resonated with me back when my whole life lay before me as a man in my 20’s. That Berry was able to write these stories as a young man himself is a testament to his incredible depth and ruminative spirit. In most cases these stories are about the lands and fields and forests and farms and rivers in the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky. In Berry’s stories the characters are the backdrop–serving only as the transient temporal stewards of the earth.
My Grandpa grew up on what I imagine to be a Berryesque farm in Aplington, Iowa. His dad was the last farmer in Butler county to give up his horses for a tractor. My grandpa’s stories about growing up on the farm diverged sharply from Berry’s. He left home the first chance he got and enlisted in the Navy, eventually making his way to the Naval Academy and then onto aircraft carriers flying some of the Navy’s first jets.
For the main character Jack Beechum–there was never a notion of leaving the farm. The novel follows him on his meandering final day on earth as he sifts through his recollections and memories from his storied life. He no longer lives on the land he worked for half a century–Berry writes that “He is four miles and sixty-four years away in the time when he had music in him and he was light.” Indeed while he physically lives in a boarding house in town, he abides in a “past that now holds nearly all of him.” This provides the narrative framework to share the story of Old Jack’s life.
I’ve tried to put my finger on how this book made me feel and I’ve mulled over it for a few weeks before writing this review.
I can’t do it. Can one feel nostalgia for a life that isn’t yours? If so, what’s it called? Sympastalgia? Can that be a word?
Old Jack began his life with unabashed optimism and hope–for love, for his land, for his life–for work. The idea of that work as an end in itself is a major theme in Berry’s writing. In particular, Jack observes the felt, rich intergenerational inheritance of working the same land as his ancestors.
The work satisfied something deeper in him than his own desire. It was as if he went to his fields in the spring, not just because he wanted to, but because his father and grandfather before him had gone because they wanted to—because, since the first seeds were planted by hand in the ground, his kinsmen had gone each spring to the fields. When he stepped into the first opening furrow of a new season he was not merely fulfilling an economic necessity; he was answering the summons of an immemorial kinship; he was shaping a passage by which an ancient vision might pass once again into the ground.
And for Jack it turned out that this richness would be his only redemption as life battered him with unmet expectations, regret, adversity and loss. After rashly choosing the wrong woman to love and marry he came face to face with ill-considered pursuit. “[He] knew the anger of regret for which he could find no fitting act. Though he did not know it then, it was an emotion that would be one of the powerful themes of his life.” It does not take long for Jack’s marriage to Ruth to decay to mutual agony as he realizes he will never be able to rise to the level of her expectations and that she would never give herself to hold him in the esteem a man yearns for.
He was a strange country and a loneliness to her. And she was doubly lonely because he feared nothing; so deeply did he belong to the place he had brought her to that even its solitude was not lonely to him…yet there remained some prize, some vital gift that she withheld. She hid her eyes from him. As much as before their marriage, she remained to him an unknown continent.
It is amidst his loneliness that he later discovers a short-lived love in a widow that a tragic accident later abruptly ends. This plunges Jack into a deep valley but ultimately one where he would rediscover his worth and his first love–his land.
While a man lies asleep in exhaustion and despair, helpless as a child, the soft rain falls, the trees leaf, the seed sprouts in the planted field. And when he knows that he lives by a bounty not his own, though his ruin lies behind him and again ahead of him, he will be at peace, for he has seen what is worthy.
It’s this connection to the eternal that grounds and validates Jack’s life. It is a holy thing to belong to someone or something greater than oneself–it’s this covenant to which Berry dedicated his life’s work in the stories of Port William.
…the land that was rightfully his, not because it belonged to him so much as because, by the expenditure of history and work, he belonged to it. He became again the true husband of his land.
The Memory of Old Jack Quotes
A Novel (Port William Book 3) by Wendell Berry
He is four miles and sixty-four years away in the time when he had music in him and he was light.
…because they feel that he is going away from them, going into the past that now holds nearly all of him.
And they yearn toward him, knowing that they will be changed when he is gone.
And yet he grieved for Nettie and Aunt Fanny, and for the thousands like them, the exiled children of the land to which their history had been a sacrifice. He knew he had seen the end of what deserved to end better than it had.
…makes Mat furious. But, as he often does, he deals with his anger by being correctly generous. He had another thing in mind.
“Jack, my boy,” Ben used to say, “the world will still be there when you get to it.” To Jack, and later to Mat, when they would be fuming about what might happen, he would say: “Let tomorrow come tomorrow, my boy.” Jack was nearly sixty before he learned to do that—but he did learn it, finally. And Ben used to say: “Let the past be gone. Let the dead lie.” He would say that, smiling his remote, knowing smile, his hand on his beard. “Let it go by, Jack, my boy.” Old Jack never has learned that.
He has been around long enough to know that death is the only perfect cure for what ails mortals. After you have stood enough you die, and that is all right.
The work satisfied something deeper in him than his own desire. It was as if he went to his fields in the spring, not just because he wanted to, but because his father and grandfather before him had gone because they wanted to—because, since the first seeds were planted by hand in the ground, his kinsmen had gone each spring to the fields. When he stepped into the first opening furrow of a new season he was not merely fulfilling an economic necessity; he was answering the summons of an immemorial kinship; he was shaping a passage by which an ancient vision might pass once again into the ground.
…knew the anger of regret for which he could find no fitting act. Though he did not know it then, it was an emotion that would be one of the powerful themes of his life.
…disavowing the very energy that bound him to her. She was bound to him by a vision of him that she held above him—that he, in fact, neither understood nor aspired to; and he was bound to her by a vision of her that she would discover, by her own lights, to be beneath her. Her ambition would be forever as strange and estranging to him as the great heat and strength of his desire would be to her. It is a cruel thing for him now, looking back, to see the two of them working out the terms of their agony. He was a fool—a simpleton and a fool—to have loved so to see the extravagance and grace of his youth reflected in a woman’s gray eyes, not by straightforward love or desire, but by what he now knows to have been fear—fear of what she even then instinctively knew to be her opposite, even her enemy.
Under his hand her flesh contracted. He could feel it, her flesh drawing away beneath his hand. He was overpowering to her. His body bent above her in the dark was like a forest at night, full of vast spaces and shadows and the distant outcries of creatures whose names she did not know. He was a strange country and a loneliness to her. And she was doubly lonely because he feared nothing; so deeply did he belong to the place he had brought her to that even its solitude was not lonely to him.
And so, though his hand went its way, though he sought the clefts and shelters of her flesh, though he entered her with the awe of a pilgrim, though he drove into her like the taker of a city, though the storm of his desire cast him ashore upon her at last, as meek and strengthless as a child asleep, yet there remained some prize, some vital gift that she withheld. She hid her eyes from him. As much as before their marriage, she remained to him an unknown continent.
…vast difference lived between them even while they worked together—the difference between hopeful and hopeless work. And now Will is going home to tell Marthy and their children that they will have to leave the place that they have worked and made. Jack feels the sorrow of a man who must always leave whatever he has made that is dear to him, who like a ghost must always leave behind the earth that he knows.
When she looks back now, her time with Virgil seems remarkable for its innocence. They seem to her to have been almost children. Their love did not know what it risked. It did not know what it was going to cost. And now this second love has come, that does know, that has stood up in the world—as one who has been sick nearly to death and grown well again rises, wondering, in the mortal light, and stands and moves. A wondrous thing: she is a mortal woman, and she is not afraid.
She feels good. She feels full of the goodness, the competency of her body that can love a man and bear his children, that can raise and prepare food, keep the house, work in the field. She is living deep in her body now as she goes under the hot, bright sky into the town of Port William.
She is what he has failed. She is his consolation and his despair. How much of his vision of the world comes right in the figure of a woman fulfilled and satisfied, her man’s welcomer, at home in the world! She is his Promised Land, that he may see but never hope to enter.
It was Mat’s place to say those words, and Old Jack has heard them with relief and joy. Mat is sixty-eight years old, past the workdays of a lot of men in these times, his hair white. And yet there he stands, sore and tired, able and ready, telling them, “We ain’t getting it done setting here, boys.”
The passivity of his old age is beginning to afflict him now, the sense of having nothing to do, no intention; his afternoon will fill itself with what he will let happen, not what he will make happen.
They fought it out among those trivial issues that later, as always, would shame them both. And yet the quarrel had the same real subject as all their quarrels: the failure of each of them to be what the other desired. The subject was loneliness and sorrow. Between them now no grievance was too trivial to reach directly into that anguish that was costing them their hopes.
And for nothing beyond the reach and touch of Rose would he care now, for there was a joy in him that overrode all outside itself, she had so imparadised his mind.
Since the beginning of his consciousness he has felt over and around him the regard of that fellowship of kinsmen and friends, watching him, warning him, correcting him, teasing him, instructing him, not so much because of any ambition they have for him as because of where he comes from and because in him they see, come back again, traits and features of dead men and women they loved.
…was in the bearing of history toward such places as Port William and even Hargrave, that achievement, success, all worthy hope lay elsewhere, in cities, in places of economic growth and power; it was assumed that a man must put away his origin as a childish thing.
And now, the shudder of realization in his flesh, he sees that he has come through. He has been faithful to his land, through all its yearly changes from maiden to mother, the bride and wife and widow of men like himself since the world began.
He saw that he would be distinguished not by what he was or anything that he might become but by what he served. Beyond him was the peace and rest and joy that he desired. Beyond the limits of a man’s strength or intelligence or desire or hope or faith, there is more. The cup runs over. While a man lies asleep in exhaustion and despair, helpless as a child, the soft rain falls, the trees leaf, the seed sprouts in the planted field. And when he knows that he lives by a bounty not his own, though his ruin lies behind him and again ahead of him, he will be at peace, for he has seen what is worthy.
It seems to him that his life has come to its true beginning. He is forty-eight years old.
He had become a man whose presence changed other men; when he came among them his influence was discernible in the way they looked or stood or spoke.
…the land that was rightfully his, not because it belonged to him so much as because, by the expenditure of history and work, he belonged to it. He became again the true husband of his land. He still worked and went ahead as before, but…
…man without a place that he respects, he thought, may do anything with money.
“Write these down,” he said. And he spoke the numbers of certain psalms: the Twenty-third, the Twenty-fourth, the Thirty-ninth, the Ninetieth, the Hundred-and-fourth, the Hundred-and-twenty-first.
…the days before Old Jack moved to town, Wheeler remembers, when one of his tenants would ask where something was, the old man would answer indignantly: “Hanging up!” Of course it was hanging up! He had been hanging things up all his life, taking care of things, keeping his leavings out from under his feet. If what he picked up had no place, he drove a new nail and made one.
